The present invention relates to a photographic camera capable of recording on an image recording medium loaded therein at least one additional image such as a letter, a numeral, an illustration or the like as well as a photographed subject.
There has been widely known and practically used a photographic camera which can record on an image recording medium an image such as a letter and a numeral simultaneously with a photographed subject.
This type of conventional camera is disclosed in, for example, Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication Nos. 60-3615 and 62-291626, wherein additional information such as date and time is recorded near the border of the picture recording film plane. In these conventional camera, in order to incorporate the additional information there have been employed: a method wherein an additional information is irradiated by use of a luminous element such as a flash discharge tube, a light emitting diode and a liquid crystal display and is recorded on a film from the front surface on the side of the lens barrel or the camera body; and another method wherein a luminous element is provided at a rear cover and an irradiated additional information is recorded on a film from the back surface. Further, U.S. Pat. No. 4,090,189 discloses a photographic camera, wherein a data element such as a letter and a numeral stored in the data block is taken through a lens on lighting of a lamp and recorded on a film together with an image of photographed subject.
As known well, a camera in recent date is equipped with, in addition to a lens assembly and a shutter assembly, various function mechanisms for example an auto-focus mechanism, an auto-film-feed mechanism, a stroboscope mechanism and the like. These various functions make the operation of a camera easy and accordingly make a camera extreamly useful for users.
Further, a whole size of a camera in recent date has been made smaller to be easily handcarried.
Therefore, in order to allow a camera to have various functions and to be small in size, it becomes an important problem to incorporate various devices, mechanical parts, electrical parts or the like into a camera.
However, the aforementioned conventional cameras described in the prior arts requires complex and sophisticated devices. For example, the camera described in the above U.S. Pat. No. 4,099,189 has a data block device comprising a lamp, a data element, a lens and the like for recording a letter, data or the like together with an image of photographed subject. Accordingly, the camera has a problem that the whole size must be large enough to accommodate the device, and the device is complex in structure and laborious to install, which leads to a large increase of production cost.
Although there are many cameras similar to but different from those described in the above prior art, each of them has a complex device for recording a letter, data or the like and consequently has a similar problem.